Drinking alcohol makes you less likely to spot a guy angling for a fight, study shows

Last updated at 11:07 30 April 2008

It may seem to state the obvious, but a landmark study from researchers in the US has found that drinking alcohol dulls the brain, making them more likely to miss the signs of a fellow drinker angling for a fight.

The study by Jodi Gilman, of the National Institutes on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, is said to be the first of its kind to show how alcohol affects the human brain and its responses to threats.

Gilman studied 12 people who were given alcohol intravenously and monitored their brain activity while they looked at pictures of frightened and neutral faces.

The study found responses were dulled, suggesting that while intoxicated, "our brain can't distinguish between the threatening and non-threatening stimuli."

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Her team did the same study, replacing alcohol with a placebo and found when people were given the placebo, their brains responded to the fearful faces.

"Our brains respond more to fearful stimuli. They signal to us that we are in threatening situations", Gilman said.

"You see this all of the time. People get into confrontations when they are intoxicated that they probably wouldn't get into when they are sober."

She said this failure to recognise threats could lead to risky situations such as drink driving and explains why alcohol is sometimes called a social lubricant.

The team also discovered that alcohol increases activity in a reward center of the brain known as the striatum, finding a link between the level of activation in this region and how intoxicated people said they were feeling.

The 12 people used in the study were social drinkers, not heavy drinkers.